


Studies

by Keturagh



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Balcony Scene, Biting, Body Worship, Come Marking, Come Shot, F/M, First Time, Light Dom/sub, Loss of Virginity, Magic, Oral Sex, Porn with Feelings, Possessive Behavior, Rough Body Play, Roughness, Scratching, Templar Nullifaction Used for Unwholesome Sex Purposes, That's Not How Magic Works, Touch-Starved, Virginity, Virginity Kink, dom!solas, honestly tho he's 8000 years old he would know how to make that first fuck amazing, reimagined with sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 06:11:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12811347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: Ashal's Templar training involves private lessons with her arcane advisor, and Solas worries that she's drifting away from the traditions of the Elvhen people. He knows he should keep his distance, but can't seem to help his flirting, or his desire to treat Ashal with the greatest tenderness when she's put in danger during their training. When their lesson in her private quarters ends explosively, their evening does the same. Solas finds that he has much to teach the warrior leader of the Inquisition after all.(This was a fic giveaway win for @vaesha-draecon and features her warrior Ashal Lavellan.)





	Studies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vaesha-draecon](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=vaesha-draecon).



The vine in his hands is a unique groundcover found only where the conditions are right: still waters, shade from willows, rich loamy soil, set high on the mountainside so that the nascent leaves are close to the light of the moon. These natural gardens must be near where the Veil is thin. There are few such places that remain in this world. Yet, he has found a such a place - a small grotto in the hills east of Skyhold, a place with a small pond, not too cold even in this brisk autumn, where the vine has taken root. This plant was once called Scarlet Vein, though Solas knows it has likely undergone study by a modern botanist, knows it’s likely the vine has been named anew by some Chantry scholar.

But he prefers the old names for things, and so he thinks of it as Scarlet Vein as he uses it for its oldest purpose. He gathered four bushels at the last full moon. He dried the vines by draping them over the scaffolding in his studio, and then this morning carefully twined the stiff ropes over his arm, bringing the bundles up in a basket along with a handful of buckets clanking in his grip, their contents rattling noisily. He has been at this labor all through the day, and it is nearly complete.

The Scarlet Vein has thorns which threaten to prick his skin, so he is wearing soft leather gloves and handling the plant most carefully. He unravels the vine in his hand in a half-moon shape onto the woven carpet. The carpet is in a rare style of representative pictoral weaving - at the center of a wreath of fainting, plumply nude nymphs, a cloaked man strikes a princely pose. He remembers Josie explaining that such a fine gift from an Antivan noble could not be refused. The noble had pledged a truly impressive sum for the relief efforts in the Emerald Graves, and the Inquisitor had begrudgingly allowed it to find a home in front of her fire. The thing is most garish. Solas would have rolled it up and pushed it aside, but for this casting it will be convenient to not touch the sigil to the floor of Skyhold itself; the fortress is old and finicky, and may treat his castings with particular discontent.

Reaching the thready end of the vine, Solas picks up another from the wicker basket at his side and ties the two vines together, continuing the line. He has done this many times already, and with this, the pattern is finally complete. He appraises the final circle, certain to check that none of his blood has been spilled into the shape he has laid out in the center of the carpet. The vines lay in a geometric shape of many concentric swirls, their knots thick where he’s tied them together, their red thorns standing out against the unique dark stems which carry such strange magical properties.

Solas picks up a stick and moves it within the pattern. He gently shoves a rock into place with his foot. Removing items from his pails, he breaks the spiralling lines here and there with other things that would look like untidy debris to any untrained in the arcane arts: dried flowers, plain wooden cups, logs split for the fire, feathers, ragged threads, plucked fingers of spruce, and the occasional copper glinting in the light from the fire, stamped with the profile of long-dead queens.

He peers down at the compass in his hand, and sips cool water from a cup in the other. With perfunctory steps he paces the circle of found items littering Ashal’s bedroom floor. He references the compass, adjusts certain items, paces around to another side of the sigil, and then makes further adjustments. He is deep in his calculations when, from behind him, there is the sound of glass being set on the table and he looks up to see Ashal gazing down distractedly at a sheaf of papers in her hand.

“How goes our lesson, Solas?” she asks.

“Quite nearly ready, Inquisitor.”

She glances up at him and her lips quirk, and even though she looks tired, the enthusiasm in her eyes is apparent. She finishes her reading, shaking her head as she sets the papers down along with a bottle of wine from under her arm.

“Sometimes, I’ll send our agents out and when they come back I can’t help… I can’t help but feel I’ve made everything worse, somehow. I encounter something every day that’s new and strange. It would be nice to feel, even once, that I could learn how to do something without so much sacrifice and loss. You’ve taken all my cups.”

He looks down at the cup of water in his hand, then at the remainder of the many cups arranged in the sigil on the floor, and allows himself a small smile.

She comes to his side and stares down in bemusement at the sigil he’s crafted on the carpet. In a rote, courtly movement that he should not indulge, he raises his arm to offer it to her. The prickling of warmth when she rests her hands lightly in the crook of his elbow is foolishness he can ignore, if he tries. And Solas tries very hard to ignore the very many foolish things he does when Ashal is near, when she touches him. But for now, he turns, pointedly, to explain the sigil to her.

“Note the way I’ve laid the vine, the echoes, the dualities -”

“I’d thought you’d be using chalk or khol, or maybe even paints, when you mentioned ‘drawing physical magicks,” she says, obviously intrigued.

“Ah, yet the chalk or khol only becomes representative of an imagined concept, in much the same way as the light that is bent to place the sigils in a standard casting. You would have seen your Keeper, or myself or Vivienne, using light to manipulate the energies of the Fade in this way before.”

“And Dorian.”

“Ah, yes,” he sniffs. “Yet Dorian’s magic is derivative of my own style of casting. By learning to oppose Elven casting, you will in turn have learned to oppose all of Tevinter, of that you may be assured. Note, here, how I have placed these four stones.”

He catches her dry chuckle at his tone, but she is thoughtful in her study. “And to nullify that magic, I reach out and erase the….”

“Do not think of it as erasing,” Solas interrupts her. “Not from what I understand. Did your Commander describe it that way?”

“He,” Ashal starts, then her mouth twists. “He’s not pleased that I’ve needed to start using the lyrium to pursue my specialized training.”

“…I see.” Solas feels a brief spike of that frustration. For all he disagrees with the Commander, he is of one mind with the Templar when it comes to this. “I admit… I have shared such reservations, Ashal. You know this.”

They have completed their circle of his found-object sigil. Ashal drops her arms from around his, and he feels the coolness in her voice.

“Not erasing, then,” she slips back to the subject, not letting them fall into this argument again. “I fortify the world around the magic - around what the magic is trying to change. I’ll do my best.”

Solas lets the argument drop there, knowing the futility of pushing Ashal. He does not know why the Inquisitor has chosen the Templar’s arts, but he finds the choice alarming, to say the least. There have been only two times he has spoken of this with her: both times, she has deflected his concerns.

Now he turns back to sigil, gesturing with a gloved hand. “Precisely. When the objects of this world are made the vessels of intent, something changes in the casting, and in the nature of the things.”

“Oh?” When she tilts her head he catches the scent of her perfume, a fragrance on her like sugar and rain.

“Yes. Come with me.” He paces to the bottle of wine and sets his cup down on the table next to the bottle. She follows. This is how it has been with Ashal since he met her, her eagerness to learn, seeking him out to teach her. Solas has always appreciated her interest in magic, her boundless curiosity, and the deference she shows to his mastery of the Fade. Though he wears the guise of a mere humble apostate in her service, she has never doubted his expertise. Ashal is not complacent, not content to live in ignorance; she has a searching soul. Solas opens the bottle with the screw nearby, removing the cork cleanly.

He overturns the bottle of wine onto his fingers and allows just a drop to touch his leather glove. He sets the bottle down and then holds out his hand to invite hers. After a moment of confusion, she puts her fingers in his. He lifts her hand and turns it over, touching his wet glove to her palm, softly tracing the outline of a simple design as he explains.

“I can wet your palm with wine like this, and you feel the cold, smell the aroma of charcoal and grapes warmed in the sun. Or,” he then reaches down and takes the cup, and places his cup in her hand. He takes the bottle of wine and pours a delicate splash into the cup. “I can pour wine into your hand. Into a vessel. Either way, you are holding wine.”

“My hand is sticky now,” she says accusingly, playfully, smiling up at him in that way, that way which he has tried, and failed, to resist. He smiles back at her.

“My apologies, Inquisitor.”

“You should at least offer to clean it up,” she suggests, teasing as she steps closer to him; her sway is immediately familiar to him, the movement recalling the moment stolen in a dream; she sips the wine he poured into the cup, and he watches as her chin lifts and shows her lovely throat.

“You are quite right, I’ve been most uncouth,” he plays along, weak, with an adopted tone of over-concern, remembering the way the dream of snow fell at Haven, the way her hand had pulled on his cheek, and… before he has had time to think of what he’s doing, he catches her fingers in his, lifts the cup from her palm, and lightly touches his tongue to the red wine there, sticky and bitter, and then his lips follow, swiftly, with a light kiss.

“Solas…” he hears her say, and he freezes, realizing too late; he has allowed the flirtation to go too far.

He wrenches up and back, dropping her hand, giving her an enigmatic smile to hide his fluster, although his face and ears burn. She is staring at the ground, her hand still hanging in the air between them. He watches her swallow, then swallow again; he can see how her face has twisted the periwinkle blue vallaslin curling on her lovely round cheeks, how she’s hiding her eyes behind her hair like soft snow. He wants to walk across hot coals for acting the blithering courtier when he is _nothing_ to her, _should_ be nothing to her, and certainly should not being going around kissing her hand if he means to keep her at a safe, and conscientious, distance. He turns away to give her a moment of privacy to recover from his idiocy, and clears his throat, resuming his explanation of the sigil and the magic of their lesson today.

Their lesson, which is the only reason, he reminds himself sternly, that he is in the Inquisitor’s bedroom, and the only reason she has set aside time from her busy schedule to meet with him today.

“As with the cup, when called to hold magic, physical items of this world become as vessels for the magic. It will not be a permanent, or even semi-permanent relationship, unlike an enchantment on an item. Yet the presence of the magic will be strong, quite a bit stronger than the magic you’ve seen hastily erected on the battlefield.” He smiles faintly, worried. “It will be quite the test of your abilities.”

He chances a glance back to her. Ashal is pouring herself another glass of wine, downing it, then pouring another. When she turns to look at him again, she has a bright smile.

“Thank you, Solas. I am so very grateful for your faith in me.”

He is forced to look away, ashamed of himself, ashamed that - yes - it is his faith in her which attracts him. It is his faith in her, and in her strength, which in turn makes him weak.

“Yes. Well.” He goes to the wall beside the fireplace and takes up his staff. “I will call the magic into the circle. Focus your abilities on the dweomers of the objects in the circle, not on myself.”

“Reinforcing reality.”

“Put simply, yes.”

“This isn’t simple, Solas,” Ashal says, with soft intensity.

He looks at her, and she is looking at him, meeting his gaze, meaning more than magic, and he knows it.

He cannot say anything without revealing himself. She looks at him: her young and certain eyes are clear. She drains her cup, smiles, and sets it on the floor, dropping into a wider stance. He looks away.

“Are you prepared?” asks Solas.

“Ready,” she affirms, and he lifts his staff overhead.

It is with the arc of his staff swinging right, then around his shoulders, then to the ground on his left that the Veil is pushed and pulled. He presses awareness into the items in the sigil. Their patterns call out to the magic; they welcome it, and it pours into their mass like ground soaking up a storm after drought. Solas feels the well call to him, begging him to take the power there and push it further through the world. It is a vestal, crisp power that has gathered here, unspoiled by the touch of a mage since the Veil hid it away, and now the magic yearns to infuse everything, scrambles to splash out of his control. He feels, at once, a curious spirit called to the racket of all this magic, pressing itself avidly towards the world that wakes - it feels him, feels the well of magic in the items in the sigil, and wonders if this means it could perhaps come through.

Ashal dips her lips against the flask at ther side, and beyond his own magic Solas senses the sharp flick of lyrium snapping against the Veil.

Then the Inquisitor raises her hands, gestures, and a feeling like a smothering blanket falls over both the well in the sigil, and over himself.

Solas fights a quick start of panic and fear. She is stronger, much, much stronger than the last time that they practiced. And her powers are climbing over him, too. _I told her to target the circle,_ a voice snarls within him. He struggles to suppress his instinct to lash out at her, not entirely succeeding. Ashal looks over at him sharply. And then, perhaps because she thinks that the way he’s nudged back against the influence of her Templar abilities is a test, she spreads the full weight of her Templar powers over him, bolstering the thickness of the Veil around him. The enormity of her power is overwhelming. He feels, suddenly, as if he is suffocating. Gasping, irrationally afraid she will never let him go, feeling like the brand might as well already sit against his forehead, Solas falls to his knees; blind, mute, his spirit choking. He lets his staff clatter to the floor, and it falls into the circle.

There is a spark and there is a loud, thunderous clap. Ashal cries out, and then Solas doesn’t feel her power pressing down on him anymore. He staggers to his feet, realizing (though he cannot hear himself) that he is shouting.

“Inquisitor! Inquisitor - Ashal!”

“Here, Solas,” he hears her, shakily, and he darts to her side. There is grey smoke billowing from the sigil. The found items are flung across the room, charred, and the Scarlet Vein is half-ash, a coal-light heat flickering at the core of the vine in places where it’s been split open.

“Water - douse,” Ashal chokes, and Solas draws energy through the Veil (relieved, perversely, that he can) in the form of a light rain over the carpet and the sigil. The vines hiss and pop as the heat within them is washed away.

“I am so sorry, I’d underestimated - I’d not thought your abilities so advanced, my own reactions were inappropriate, I have endangered you, my deepest apologies…” Solas only stops when Ashal presses her fingers to his lips, and he is shocked to realize that she is laughing.

“Solas, that was incredible!”

“… Incredible?” He sits up and, when she does not stop laughing, he stands stiffly and goes to the doors to the balcony, opening them. He takes up a pillow from the couch and fans the smoke outside, Ashal still chortling on the floor and brushing off her pants. “I’m surprised no one has come to investigate the noise,” he comments drily.

“That’s because I’ve dismissed most everyone for a picnic down in the lower camps today,” she says, picking debris from her hair.

Solas looks back to her, curious.

“Believe it or not, I thought something like this,” she gestures at the scorched circle on the floor, “might happen. Playing around with powerful magic and Templar nullification? So, I thought it prudent to clear the castle… just in case.” She grins at him, so much bold fire in her fierceness and in her pride. “I’m a little more than you can handle, seems like.”

Solas hides his smile to see her, her victory like a brightness that makes her radiant, already chastising himself for the foolishness of his brief panic.

“I’m afraid I’ve well-ruined our exercise for the evening,” he says ruefully, gesturing the pillow in his hand at the unrecognizable soggy burnt black carpet. He stands with one foot in the room and another on the balcony, where the air is clearer.

Ashal staggers to her feet, still giggling. He watches her with concern, but she sways out past him onto the balcony, grabbing the pillow from him as she passes and hugging it to her chest. “I’m not worried about that.” She grins. “You know how much I’ve hated that rug ever since Josie had it set up in there? It came from some human noble - some fool of a man who wanted me to know what ‘depraved fascination’ my ears ‘lit his heart with fire.’ Or some nonsense. But four hundred blankets for the refugees?” She shrugs. She sets the pillow on the balcony and leans against it.

Solas eyes the state of the bedroom. He decides to pull ajar the other doors leading to the balcony, and circles back inside just to grab another pillow, trying to waft most of the smoke through the open doors and out of the bedroom.

He blinks when he makes it back to the balcony, his eyes stinging.

Ashal is watching him with a bright, sweet grin. “You look half-mad, waving that thing around in there.”

“Not very dignified of a mage, to be fanning the smoke of an explosion from the premises, perhaps.” He chuckles. “But more frequent than you might think.” He smiles with a little hesitation, leaning on the balcony near her and giving her a sideways glance.

She notes his tension, the flick of his gaze, and places her hand in reassurance on his arm. “I may be a Templar by training, Solas, but you don’t have to be nervous about magical mishaps around me. And,” she grimaces, “I really had no love for that carpet. It came with no fewer than eight proposals of marriage, and I’ve half a mind to hoist the thing from the highest tower. I’m not sure how to thank you.”

He clears his throat to hide his chuckle, tasting the acidic bit of smoke still in his lungs.

Raising a hand to cover the inelegant display, he has to spit the foul taste over the balustrade. “To the nobility,” he quips.

“The nobility,” she echoes with a laugh, and he loves seeing her smile like that, wishes he could see her free with joy more often.

A wing of some thirty geese stirs the peace of the mountains, their calls a ruckus on the icy slopes. The watch them pass below together in an easy, tired silence.

“I know all you have been asked to endure since taking up your sword here, Ashal. The risks you have to take. I’m sorry,” he says, quiet.

Her hand slides down his arm and settles at his elbow, and then Ashal slips her feet out of her small slippers and balances her step over a small pile of snow on the balcony. She deftly touches the sole of her foot into the snow, crushing the little pile and burying her foot half in snow, and then rubs her toes in the other direction, using him for support.

“Odd little dance,” Solas comments.

She raises the back of her foot for him to see, then the other, and he sees the comparison between them. Her right is still covered in grime and soot, while her left is mostly clean. Still, some patches remain, and he chuckles. “Ah, allow me to assist.”

He kneels, gathers snow in his gloves, and carefully lifts the cold ball against her pointed sole. He holds onto her calf while her toes rest on his thigh. Her long, slim leg feels soft. He presses the snow to the bottoms of her feet, washing off the dust and ash. When he looks up at her, she is looking down at him, her gaze filled with some ambiguous emotion. He cannot place it. He is afraid to place it.

“You do not shiver,” he murmurs, looking back down.

Then he feels her fingers under his chin. He follows her gentle tug, looking back up at her. The clear sky is a stunning shade behind her, the sun just starting to flirt with the mountaintops, deeply golden on the white hills.

“I can handle the cold,” she says, her eyes so confident, so new, and kind, and full of promises.

There is a moment where he kneels beneath her and she holds his chin in her hand, and he looks up and realizes, he has _missed_ seeing her. He has missed seeing how she’s been forced to grow so quickly into the leader she is, how gracefully she has taken charge of so many fragile lives, and her determination to keep them safe has fed the power of her abilities. Her iron will has come to bear in defense of the needs of thousands. From the time he spent with her, their early days in Haven, to now - he has missed seeing her become capable, and strong.

He has missed seeing her decide what she wants.

And in this moment, he realizes, with galling clarity, that what she _wants_ is _him._

Suddenly his face is impacted by the soft fluffy ‘boof’ of a pillow hitting the side of his head. He yelps low and grapples out for his own pillow, returning a volley to her without hesitation. Ashal laughs, hits him again, this time on the shoulder, and Solas manages to land a soft hit to her thigh. Feathers fly around them and float in the icy air, swirling and landing on the stone and snow.

Then she slips and starts to lose her balance. He is quick to end their game, lunging forward and catching her before she falls. His hands grasp at her waist. He keeps his distance, frowning.

“Are you alright?” Solas asks.

Ashal beams, sways easily deeper into his arms, and floats her touch up his chest. And then she is kissing him, and he’s wrapping his arms around her, and leaning over her as he dips her back in a passionate, breathless kiss. His blood still pounds from the brief play, his head light, almost dizzy. Kissing her feels so right, and good, and it sends a jolting buzz of pleasure zig-zagging across his skin.

“Ashal,” he whispers against her lips, and she bites down seductively on his lower lip, and his whisper turns into a groan; his retreating sense finds it reassuring that there are so few people who will be left in the castle grounds, at knowing most of the main force is down in the lower camps boosting the morale of those who have spent the long months sleeping in tents on the frozen ground.

“You’d like, perhaps, to go with me down to the picnic in the lower camp?” Solas asks when he musters his willpower to pull away, and Ashal studies his face, but he avoids her gaze. He releases her, but she does not move away - she remains close, looking at him even though he should not - will not - look at her.

“No, Solas,” she says slowly, thoughtfully. “I would like to stay here.”

“Ah. I understand. Well, I will send up an attendant who may clear away the debris from our earlier lesson, I will -” he turns from her, makes it a half-step, and then his heart clenches as she catches his arm.

“Don’t go.” Ashal says it so gently. She is not beseeching him. She is not begging.

She does not need to.

She simply tells him what, in that moment, he knows he is already condemned to do.

“Stay,” she adds simply, and he closes his eyes.

“It would be kinder, in the long run…” Yet, he tries to imagine another moment spent without seeing her smile, without feeling her, warm and sighing in his arms… “Yet, losing you would…”

Solas turns. Ashal guides his arms back around her, presses herself closer to his chest, nuzzles up under his neck and kisses his collarbone and the rise of his throat, then he dips his mouth to hers, and she meets his lips. The kiss grows fiercer, longer; neither will give up the other’s taste. Solas feels his mind clouded and yearning, wanting more. His gloved hands roam. He grasps, then grasps lower, and Ashal yelps into his mouth. He tries to start lifting her, but with her combat training it must be easy for her to intuit his intentions. She pushes, instead, throwing him off-balance and making him stumble back. They both sink to the floor, to the cold grey stone of the balcony, she climbing atop him, things escalating far quicker than he has any right to desire, than he has any right to allow.

“Ashal,” he gasps into their kiss.

“Solas,” she moans, and her lap is against where he is already shamefully, desperately hard. She moves, experimentally, and Solas nearly loses it as he watches her eyes flutter back and she starts to grind, groaning, on the stiff thick bulge of his dick straining in his breeches.

“Ashal - I will -” he gasps again, his voice jerking high, his gaze first raised to her in avid attention, then dropping back with a moan to the hard stone floor. “I cannot, it has been - a very long time, please, _vhenan,_ please…” He isn’t sure what he is begging for, knowing he cannot indulge in anything with her, knowing he mustn’t, but Ashal hears him, and with a small sigh, she lifts herself from his lap. She keeps straddling him, looking down at him with her ice blue eyes heavily-lidded.

“It feels as good as they said it would,” she slurs, as if in a daze.

Suddenly, Solas feels much colder. He raises on his elbows, studying her. “As ‘they’ said?”

Ashal places a hand, deliberately, on his chest, and pushes him back down. He goes, and she follows him down, her white hair falling over her shoulders and tickling his ears and neck, and he allows himself the indulgence of letting her press soft, plush kisses against his neck and jaw.

“The Keeper,” she explains, “and the other women in the clan. They said it would be like one’s own touch, but filled with deeper warmth; and it is. I long to see you shiver.”

“You have not, before, taken a lover?”

Ashal lifts back and shakes her head, and when she bends again to resume her tender ministrations, Solas finds the strength to push her up.

He looks at her, thighs splayed on his lap, his hands on her shoulders, and after some time she flushes under his gaze, her eyes shifting slightly to one side.

“No, though I have seen as animals rut. And I have been told of the particulars. But no, I haven’t taken a lover.” She looks back to him, and now she is beseeching. “Solas, please. Please, stay. I want it to be you. You are the one I take,” she cups her hands around his chin. She leans her forehead against his. “You are the one I choose.”

Solas feels a dropping in his gut, but it is not disappointment, as it should be. He realizes at once that it is… excitement. A damnable, gross thrill, straining in his prick and filling his head with all sorts of nonsense - the smug flattery in being her chosen, the power of guiding her to satisfaction, the silly titillation of her chastity.

He would spoil her, he knows.

“I am not the man you want to have do this.”

Ashal scoffs. Under his returning glare, she rolls her eyes.

“Fine,” she allows indignantly. “Maybe. Maybe I’ll regret it one day. Maybe I’ll look to the sky and shake my fist and curse your name! But even when two people are brought to such lows, cursing the fates and the Creators for bringing them their mate, doesn’t the love between them endure? Yes. Why do you look like that? Of course I love… I love you, Solas. _Ar lath ma,”_ she says it, so simply, as if it is the simplest thing, and Solas realizes, with a shiver… that it is.

“Ar lath, ma vhenan,” he confesses, and then her lips are back on his. _Oh,_ that… she loves him? This is a galloping, mad wanting within him. _He wants her to love him._ He wants to do anything, _to be anything,_ that will make her keep saying that - that will make her love him, that will make her promise, over and over again, that he is loved, and that he can be loved… that he is worthy of her love. He will ask her in small ways one thousand times to keep making sure, so that the moment it is over, the moment he has gone too far, he will know. _Does she still love him?_

He has only just heard her confession.

He already fears the day she will look at him, and say, simply, that it is no longer true.

_Oh,_ but she loves him _now._

Then she bites his neck, and his hips buck up against her, and he groans at the rough chafing of his breeches against his throbbing cock.

“I know it’s not done with clothes,” she gasps with a laugh, and hastily has undone her shirt and revealed to him the pert mounds of her breasts before he can think to object. He stares, then she pulls at his clothes and he at hers, the both of them frantic. She pulls off his belt, then his tunic, then his undershirt over his arms. He starts to remove his gloves, but she stops his hand and tells him to leave one on; he smirks, a rush of pleasure in the pit of his stomach. With one glove off, though, he can truly feel the softness of her skin. He leans to lay back down with the buckles of her shirt still in his fingers and teeth but he hisses at the cold of the balcony floor, so as he finishes undoing her buttons, she fumbles around behind his back, laying out his sweater and one of the pillows as best she can over the stones. And then he is unlacing her with perfunctory, careful pulls. He slows, looks up at her.

She stands, and for a moment he fears he has indeed gone too far, that he should have stopped this as it began.

But she pushes off her pants and smallclothes impatiently, and drops back down to clumsily try and pull his own breeches from him. He helps her as best he can, feeling foolish and young and madly in love, and when she sees his bare cock flop from his breeches, she stops a moment, stunned.

He has to fight against a number of ungentlemanly impulses, then.

Ashal looks at him, clearly feigning an easy nonchalance.

“If you think that will fit, I’m willing to try.”

He cannot help the wide grin that splits his mouth, and Ashal rolls her eyes, making it all the more obvious when she glances back, in shy fascination, at the length of his cock. She settles her legs over him again. He gathers her back into his arms. His erection arcs up against his belly, and he clenches the muscle to cause it to wag up against her, twice, glad when she laughs and hides her laughter in her palm.

“You’re doing that!” she accuses him.

“I make no claim to the contrary,” he answers, a brush of feeling like giddiness making his heart feel bright. _Ar lath ma,_ he remembers the cadence of her tone, the gentleness in her eyes.

Yet he will not take her with pain, and so there are preparations to account for.

“Have you taken yourself,” he asks, “with rod or fingers?”

Ashal shrugs, and nods. “Yes, fingers, at times, although I admit to not seeing much point.”

“Ah,” he nods, and rubs his hand on her bare thigh. “Tell me: would you like me to act upon you, to lead you? Or,” he smirks, lazy, inviting, “would you like to tell me what to do, da’len?”

Her flush, he is able to note now, reaches the tops of her pert, smooth breasts.

“The first,” she says with just a slight hitch in her voice. “For this time,” she adds.

“Excellent.”

He licks his lips, and lunges.

Ashal squeals. He noses up and presses his mouth to her bare nipple, just peeking out from the fold of her unbuckled shirt.

He feels her writhing in his arms and his mind goes mercifully blank under the force of his lust, having her tit between his teeth far too pleasurable to bear the standard scrutiny of his careful thoughts. Her tit is so soft, and thick, and there is so much for him to bounce and suckle, her breasts being wonderfully overlarge for her petite frame - a fact, he can now admit, which has not escaped him before today, his eye often drawn to her bustier in battle or when she would attire herself for meetings with nobles. He had always been dutiful in looking carefully away, in not cataloguing the wanton wiggle of her decolatogue. But now, he has no restraint. He gathers her tits in hand and presses his face between her cleavage, moaning softly, listening with satisfaction to the way his measured tonguing of her nipples, both at once, makes her gasp and groan above him.

“Oh, you’re -” she finally manages to stutter past her pleasured groans, “you’re a pervert, you - _ah_ \- you dirty, you - _ohh_ -”

“Everything to its purpose,” he mumbles into her breasts, and reaches out to find her hand, then slips her own fingers in between her thighs. She gasps softly, and not, this time, from his suckling and warm flicking on her nipples.

She pulls her hand away and stares at it, at the clear trail like an icicle dripping from her fingertip, then she stares at him. “I’ve never… I’m so wet,” she says, like it shouldn’t be that easy, and he revels in the knowledge that she has never been so, has never been toyed with, and enjoyed, and that the responses of her body are still a new and exciting mystery to her. Then he notices the way her nipples stand hard, the way small piles of snow dust the balcony around them, and he adjusts her on his lap.

“Ah, are you too cold here? We should move inside. In fact, a bed, for your first time - soft, and gentle…”

Ashal shakes her head. He starts to object, but she lunges down and kisses him fiercely. “I said I could handle the cold,” Ashal says, “and so help me Solas, if you take me gently…” She humps the newness of her wet against his bare cock, and the heat between her lips and the wetness she smears over his length nearly wrecks him. “Don’t you _dare_ ,” she emphasizes, leaving him breathless with a hard, meaningful rut, nearly taking him into her cunt by the sheer intensity of her roll across his length.

He ducks his hips aside at the last moment, panting.

“I’ve heard you. I’ve heard you. I won’t last - Ashal, vhenan, stop, _stop_.” It has been too damn long. He should have yanked himself to completion when he’d awoken that morning from another dream at Haven - revisiting his memory of the moment she had turned his chin and kissed him, and he’d been hard and throbbing under the sheet. But he had had their lesson to prepare for, and now - now his excitement is mounting, and his body shudders at being so lovingly, ardently attended by her sweet dance on his lap. In a past age, he would have been seduced so by her: in silks, she would have sat and humped him lounging back in the feasthall, his belly full and the candles low, her dance a coltish marvel - one of graceful jumps, tawdry undulations, and then the beguiling, intimate swaying of her hips over his through the night.

“Enough,” he begs.

She stops, a knowing, sly grin on her lips.

He chuckles, her precociousness endearing. “Come,” he says, and cannot help but smile as he pulls her down, close, again, and once more feels the soft press of her lips on his. The kiss is long and deep, with a bite from the mountain cold, and the press of the chill stone floor cold beneath his back where the pillow and sweater do not cover, and beneath them, further than that, the balcony juts over the precipice of the snowy, wind-worn hills.

He guides her hand - which, he notes with a wash of tenderness, cannot conceal its slight tremble - to what he hopes is a familiar position on her clit, and then lets his own touch trace lower. He angles his palm so that his wrist presses against the tips of her fingers, encouraging her stimulation of the small mound at the meet of her lips. His fingers, meanwhile, probe and stroke, gently, lower: he is curious, then avid, feeling the hot wet of her dripping around his touch.

“Solas,” she breathes, choked, in surprise.

He presses only one finger up, gently, within her.

The resistance meets him. It is unusual that she has kept this, given that she has experimented with herself, and it’s likely that her experimentation was clumsy and crude. Yet the feel of her hymen is unmistakable.

“There is so much I will give you, this eve, my heart. But this - I will take.”

“I understand,” she blushes, and he feels her hips start to move down. He clamps his hand down on her hip to keep her still, and she only blinks at him, flustered and nervous - the very opposite of what he wants for her in this moment.

No.

“Lay back,” he tells her, and she does as he asks - he takes her coat and the pillow from atop the railing and lays them under her back, but still she shivers.

“What should I -?” she asks, but he touches the side of her face, leaning over her, tracing his touch down her neck, her collarbone, and then the smooth, flushed rise of her breast.

“Allow me to warm you,” he murmurs, and reaches out for a hearth’s glow from the fade - the spirit is waiting there, still curious, drawn by the intensity of feeling between them. It is a small and harmless wisp, and Ashal inhales sharply as it flickers into view over her head.

“Solas, no, it’s not safe,” she complains, worried.

“It will not harm you,” he appeases her softly, kissing down her breast, over her stomach, and settling his head comfortably between her thighs. “It will keep you warm.”

He looks up to see her transfixed by the glittering, changing colors of the wisp dancing over her eyes, its little form capturing and reflecting the rays of the sun. In another age, one thousand such curious spirits would have been drawn by their play, enamored of her surprise and joy at so much newness, performing a kaleidoscope of color in the canopies of the trees over the bower where he would take her. He would have devoted an age to teaching her body how to respond to the barest licks of his tongue. He would have carried on for so many seasons, needing no sustenance but the grapes and pears brought to them by their attendants, licking her lightly, stretching and preparing her as he did so, until she had woken and slept and woken through so many nights of tormented pleasure that her sex finally convulsed and her pleasure carried her through hours of exalted bliss. And then he would have taken her at the height of her delirium, pressing his aching length within her to feel her tight newness well-ready to suck his seed from him at last.

He will not have such luxury now, no vast turn of seasons upon which he can pace and measure her inauguration into the attentions of man.

But he will see her warm and sated.

As she watches the light of the wisp spreading a soft warmth over her whole body, dancing and shifting its colors in the air above, Solas leaves a line of kisses down her thigh. She notices, finally, and makes as if to try and close her legs - but he eases her knees apart, knowing his voice is rough when he tells her, “Shh, it’s alright. Please, allow me. _Hush,_ Ashal, let me show you.”

She surrenders, shyly, dropping the tension in her thighs, and allowing him to push her open further. Her knees fall at a gawky angle, evidence that she must be used to lying straight with legs together when she touches herself for pleasure.

He uses two fingers on his bare hand to spread her sex, feeling drugged, his smile idle and foolish, and then he opens his lips around her untouched pearl, placing himself on her, tasting the salt of her, satisfied, in a peculiar way, that his is the only tongue that’s known her.

She cries out, and he wonders if she knew she would be this loud.

He suspects that she’s rather surprised herself, from the way her wrist flies to her mouth. She cannot stifle another low, muffled moan as he suckles on her clit. Her hips thud up against his chin. This pulls an “mmff” from his throat, and his breathing whistles in his nose as he takes her suddenly with great passion, nipping, his fingers teasing her lower labia, pulling, stroking, his tongue flicking rapidly and with greater force before he sucks her fully and pulls his head back, making his movements into a steady drumbeat on her sex, sensitive and new. He works her to a point of unraveling, sordid and certain, while her eyes dull with lust and she loses her sensibilities. She stares up with slack lips at the glimmering wisp warming her whole body with a blanket of soft heat. Her fingers grip and scrabble on the stones beneath her.

He ceases. With a deft movement he scoops some of the wetness streaming from her, running his finger in gentle strokes across one side, only, of her sex, his touch lazing softly on her mound to the left of her pearl. At first she seems to dislike the way he’s become so merciful in his feeling of her; but Solas is determined to train her pleasure in the old, esoteric way, and he may not have an age, but he has enough time to lead her body into rolling waves of shivers from just this repeated movement - just this barest pressure, sliding rhythmically back and forth. He feels Ashal resist, at first, perhaps coming back to her senses somewhat, feeling some manner of embarrassment in her exposure to him? Then, as the wind blows and the sprite gleams in a radiant display against the darkening sky, and as time passes, he feels her relax, mesmerized by the sensation, trained to trust his touch.

Solas takes her, his mouth plush on her pearl: knowing full well that should she meet with any other man as the years come upon her, few would be able to match him in technique, or in his careful, responsive attention to each and every one of her bright gasps, winces, moans, and avid sighs. But he cannot think of another having her like this - foolish though it is, the very notion flares a deep, dormant fury, an irrepressible envy, and the swirl of carnal entitlement and mastery reasserts itself with every surge of his tongue over her clit: “She is mine, she is mine, _she is mine…_ ” And when he feels the tension shaking her thighs, and her moans are plentiful and lewd, he places a single finger, gently, up into her soaking sex. His finger fits snug into the hole at the center of the soft pink tissue of her hymen, and then he presses further, softly stretching the tissue down, supple with the wet of her arousal. She does cry out, but her eager rocking of her hips leads him to the conclusion that it is for the want of fullness, not pain; good, this is as it should be. He presses a second finger up in with the first, slowly and patiently working the hymen wider with steady, pampering strokes. and this time brings his gloved hand to her ass, guiding her hips forward, slowly, in a luxurious, riding roll.

The flush that covers her body is much more elegant than the gargle that emits from her delicate throat.

Solas smirks, and Ashal tries to look at him with something like an accusation.

“You must be quite correct,” Solas says. “What point could there be to this?”

“Fuck you.” He hooks his fingers in response, turning her naughty outburst into a pliant, empty-headed gasp.

“Language, Ashal,” he murmurs. Then he really sets to her: he must prepare her, must acclimate her to penetration. He stretches her side to side, and then, having done what he can in the short time given, he presses up within her. Not every woman would have been certain to enjoy this, it is true; yet he has been correct in suspecting she’d been unaware of the sensitive dimples within her sex. She is aroused, and so her cunt pushes the sensitive spot toward him, baring the key to her pleasure for him to enjoy. He plows her, gesturing his touch as he makes her rock and rubs her clit. The hymen stretches around his fingers, gradually shaping to allow for more of him to fill her - he is gratified to be the one to condition her, to groom and prepare her for what comes next. She throws her head back. She has gone from making quiet gasps to making no sound at all.

Then she makes a very quiet, whimpering groan, and he snatches back his hand from between her legs at once.

She rides the air over his face, making angered, frustrated gasps as her hips buck out of her control, slapping her hands down on the stones and the snow. Amused, he folds his hands under his chin and watches her convulse.

“If I open my eyes and you are looking up at me with some smug-ass smirk, Solas, I swear,” she whines. She looks down at him and scowls, pushing up and reaching down and pinching the bottom of his ear, giving it a little tweak. He yelps, laughs, and she pulls him up into a kiss, sloppy and wanting. “But _why_?”

“I hope that was not too unpleasant,” he smiles, small and distant. He is surprised when her nail traces gently in the outline of where he knows a little age line creases his mouth.

“It wasn’t precisely what I had in mind,” she says, and her head ducks, and he can see she’s blushing, a slight shiver in her shoulders.

He touches her knees and says, firmly, “Ashal, we are going inside now.”

“No.” Her response is resolute, and he’s surprised by the strength of it. He is going to argue, already sitting up and wrapping his arm around her lower back, when she lifts her hips, reaches between them, clumsily wraps her hand around his hard cock flopping against his stomach, and reverses their positions, pushing him and climbing up his legs so that she is straddling him and he is on his back beneath her.

“No,” she says again.

And then she pushes her hips, premature but determined, down around his girth. He hears her slight whimper and whispered, “Solas.”

Thoroughly defeated, Solas bites down on a shout, all his energy siphoned to his restraint. His hands grasp around her back, finding her hair, tangling in her hair. He pulls his hand, down, distantly hearing her hiss, overwhelmed by his desire. This heat, surrounding, tight, like he has not felt in an age, in one hundred ages… he possesses her body suddenly, and she possesses his.

_This was not how it was supposed to happen._

“Fuck, _minx,_ you - ah - you bad, intolerable wench -” he both berates and praises, the thickness of want in his throat. She is a quick student - she always has been - and she grasps at once how to rise and drop her hips, mimicking the pace he set with his fingers when he plunged within her. The angle she’s sitting at makes it impossible for her to take him deeper: only his tip presses shallowly within her cunt. But still, when she tightens around him, her sex almost unyielding in its narrow grip, he becomes gallingly aware that he will not last like this.

“Me?” she tries to croon, but her composure is unmistakably rattled, and she’s breathless, “Bad? I was so close, Solas. And yet you pulled away. Why?” There’s a determined wickedness in her smile, a new confidence in herself that he would never stifle. She leans closer to him and he releases her hair; she brings her breasts intentionally close to his lips, pushing her hips down as she does and squirming to force more of his cock inside her slick, tight heat. The sensation does no less than make his eyes roll and his head thud back.

“Fuck me,” he hears her whisper from somewhere far above him.

He groans, feeling her wetness dripping down his length and his balls, the cold of this wet meeting the mountain air contrasting with the lurid, tight heat of her sinking around the tip of his trembling prick.

Solas struggles to not look at her, afraid the sight of her impaled on his prick will cause him to spend. But he cannot help meeting her eyes. He knows his gaze is too gentle, knows his smile is too fond, knows he should not be looking up at her like she is the light of the world: but there she is. And he is wholly subsumed. His hands dig on her ass, and he moves his hips, very carefully, up, repositioning her and sliding deeper into her cunt.

Ashal pants, her eyes widening. She had been taking him only superficially, and now, as he pushes himself up within her, her hand flies to her stomach, her fingers pressing experimentally.

“I didn’t know I’d feel… there’s so much… ” she swallows, and he nearly loses it watching her struggle like this, to describe the sensation of feeling him pressing up inside of her. He has to close his eyes, his head drifting back down with languid pleasure, his hands on her hips to keep her still, until the frantic, premature pulsing in his shaft has subsided. He has avoided spilling in her, just barely, and realizes he will need to take certain measures. Then, he finally feels comfortable taking her with a single deep, strict thrust.

“Solas!” Ashal’s hand flies out and grips the banister. The fingers of her other hand clench, digging into his shoulder.

The scratch is deep enough to draw blood. Solas hisses and his magic reacts: a barrier flies out of his control, repels her nails and her whole hand back with a loud crack of magic.

This is not like calling on the wisp for warmth. This is magic for battlefields and war, and Ashal must react on instinct, as he has, because when she next rocks down upon him, she makes the world around him rigid, tight, and unyielding.

The fullness of it slams him behind the eyes. Solas is smothered beneath her power as her lips catch his mouth in a furious kiss. Again, as before, the panic crawls up inside him and he fights against his reaction. Above him, Ashal rocks her hips more rapidly, finding a rhythm that soothes her cantering lusts, and he can feel the press of her fingers on her cunt making her heat and moans rise.

“Ashal,” he pleads, strangled, when she breaks the kiss on a particularly loud, long groan.

“Your cock, Solas, fuck. This feels - incredible, I didn’t know… fuck,” she says. He would echo each sentiment, but he’s fighting against his own magic, which wants to rise up and violently cast off the effect of Ashal’s nullification. His desires are making his head fuzzy, making it difficult to think, and the bright pain of Ashal’s nails again crushing down into his shoulder inspire within him an entirely different cocktail of want.

He cannot speak to make her understand, and so with a surrendering moan he has to let his magic flash out. It goes with a smack of his gloved hand squarely on her ass. A whip of his mana seeks the touch of the Fade and cracks out against the smothering shell of Ashal’s ability. The force and pure power of the blow is enough to make her choke and cease her working as she realizes what has been done.

“Solas, I’m sorry -!”

But every nerve is singing in his body now, every hair on his arms is standing on edge, and an electric jolt runs through his spine as his magic rebounds back to and through him. He stops her with a wild shake of his head, rocking the back of his skull hard side to side on the balcony floor, and his hips buck up against her as he rides the unexpected wave of sensation and magical energy ripping through his veins.

When he has his voice, he can murmur, “Are you harmed, Ashal?”

Her concern apparent, she reassures him of her health. “And to be perfectly frank, I am much better than usual,” she adds, teasing as she bobs her hips; he is still snug in her cunt, and this makes him moan while her humor does what it always does: it makes him feel, for just one moment, that there is a small world just between them - a safe and quiet place of intimacy, a place where light shines through like sun in a bent glass.

There is a taste in his mouth like burnt herbs, a sharpness from the taste of lyrium on her tongue.

“Do that again,” he tells her, and he starts casting again, gently warming the air around her body, licking delicate lines of warmth through the stones beneath their bodies.

Ashal only has a moment to breathe before she calls on whatever force pushes back against him. Solas sits up, wrapping his arms around her, hastily tugging off the fingers of his remaining glove and tossing it aside, whispering, “Go slowly. Be gentler, careful now.” As he instructs her, he pumps slowly, in and out and in. He lifts her just enough to make their union smooth as her cheeks darken, and she struggles to do as he guides her to do: applying her power evenly, with a constant, solid push, not suffocating him, but pressing back against his magic.

The force of her makes him groan, and the weight against his magic sparks. He knows this is obscene - having the comforting presence of the Fade disintegrate from his consciousness should offend, should feel like a violation… but it makes her, in his arms, more by contrast, the hazy edges of her aura disappearing. The wandering of his mind, always sounding against the strength of the Veil, is spiraling slow and safe down back to his body - his attention pulling, instead, to her. She comes into focus and he realizes he had not known he was drifting away.

He has been drifting for a long time.

But now he’s holding her, and the whole world shifts.

“Ashal,” he whispers; he rests his head on her collarbone, and says words that could have been prayers, once, before he stopped believing in the theater of faith. The wisp has been banished back through the Veil as a side effect of her abilities, but they are hot with the effort of love, and they keep each other warm.

“Solas,” she sighs into his ear, and her arms cling around his shoulders, and her sex is tight around him, and her presence presses him down to the earth, and into what is hard, and right, and real, and he cannot be agnostic about her warmth, or her moans, or the press of her tight sex down on him.

The heat of her breath overwhelms him. His grip around her back is tight, his other arm supporting him, holding him upright. Although he knows he should go slowly, he is eager. His body is eager for hers, and as he speeds up, she moans and encourages him and then finds his lips and bites - and then her nails are scratching, making his skin crawl and shiver, the lines cut by her nails raked into his skin. There is a reflex of his magic, reaching for healing - but she suppresses it, and the mana rebounds through his body, and when he lifts her on his lap, smacking his hips up against her, smacking her ass, she scratches him again, crying out, holding on as best she can.

“Have you needed to be fucked slowly, ma Ashal?” he mutters against her neck, her chin, her lips. “… Have you needed to be fucked hard?”

“Hard,” she says, her hair pasted by sweat to her face and neck.

Then she moans, because this is the first time a man has filled her, and she could not have anticipated this.

He sets his hips to whipping, slamming up against her, holding her hard with all the strength in his arm, bracing again so he can lift her as he thrusts upwards. Her slick dribbles between their bodies and he watches her breasts bounce, his gaze shifting down to the vision of his cock sliding in and out of her, stuffing her full again and again. Now he concentrates the pressure of his magic to one particular location, and pushes through her nullification; he must use all his might, but though she holds up her end of the game, pressing him back down, the faltering in her resolve fills him with satisfaction.

She moans, and then her head rolls on her neck as she feels the tightening throughout her whole body - he directs rhythmic pulses of pressure directly on her clit, and watches her go limp and pliant above him, trusting to him completely, letting herself get fucked on his cock - his cock. Her virgin sex takes his pounding and her sweet, pleasured moans tell him all he needs to know about her enjoyment, about her defenseless lusts.

“Hard?” Solas asks.

“Harder.”

“Ma nuvenin,” he obliges.

He should not be so rough with her, not for her first time. But then she’s biting his neck, and the tensions reach a breaking point within her: she comes with a strength that nearly milks him, the whole world snapping into lucidity around him for one more brief, violent moment as her power waxes. He starts to slow, but she digs her nails down his back, pounding down on him with fever - and so, finding she can ride pleasure upon pleasure, he guides her body through crest after crest, discovering she is wanton, expending every ounce of his stamina, relentless to her insatiable greed for his cock. Every time his dick rebounds off the slick wall of her sex, she cries out an obscenity: _fuck, shit, gods, fuck,_ in an impure chorus. He takes her through another release, her whole body rocking, naked and sweaty in his arms.

Her voice mists in the cooling fall of night across the snowy mountains. He cannot warm them - he must reserve his magic for two relentless pressures: the first, the buzzing, persistent circling of the pearl that makes her shake, and, the second, the tight ring of denial that refuses release for his red and bloated cock, shining with her spends and rock-hard even after so many tortures from her rippling heat.

He has maintained this through the press of her power, determined to hold back his release.

At last she starts to list to one side, drunkenly unaware of her own failing strength. It can be now. He pushes his lips close to her ear.

“I am going to fill you with my seed,” he tells her hoarsely. “I am going to fill you.”

“Yes,” she sighs, “more.”

“I am going to make you feel me seeping from you for days, ma Ashal,” he tells her, sliding into Elven, the frenzy of possessing her like a madness he knows shows in his voice. “Your cunt will ache for me.”

“Yes.”

“Your little clit will warm and swell whenever I am near. You will know I have taken you.”

“Yes.”

“Your hobble will announce your lost maidenhead to all who see you, who watch you lead, they will know you have received my cock, and you will long to be painted by my spend…”

_“Now. I want it now.”_

This carries him over, the sweet desperation in her begging, his yearning to fill her, the heat under his balls unbearable, his testes snug, the wild pulsing of his cock too much - finally, too much. His seed smashes through the tight cockring of his magic. He loses all sense in the fullness of the heat that floods his body, of the feeling of covering the inside of her sex with splatters and thick ropes of semen; the smell is thick in the air, and he watches with half-lidded eyes the look of shock on her face as his milk won’t slow. He lifts her as he thrusts into her, his semen squeezing back out of her with squelching noises between the base of his cock and the ring of what’s left of her hymen.

When she melts to the side, he sinks down with her, cradling her in his arms, his softening length slipping from her and drooping numbly on his thigh.

“Ar lath ma,” he tests.

“Ar lath ma,” she slurs back, and he has to close his eyes, very slowly, to keep them from stinging.

He placates the little wisp so abruptly pushed back behind the Veil, and it darts away from his awareness. It is becoming night.

Solas lifts Ashal, brushing snow from her white hair. He carries her inside, the two pillows dangling from his fist, her clothing draped on his arm. He sets her down and tells her to see to herself, and when she comes stumbling back from the watercloset, he collects her back up into his arms. He whispers, “ar lath ma,” as he tucks her under the comforter, and she whispers the same back. The room is cleared of smoke, but he lights sugary-smelling candles to help banish the lingering scent of burned things. He whispers, “ar lath ma,” as he looks over at her, her eyes closed and her breathing long; she agrees with him, a sleepy, _‘mhm,’_ and sweetly sighs. He brings a long shirt from her cabinet into the bed, his knees sinking into the mattress. He gently prompts her arms into the sleeves, saying as he does so, “ar lath ma.”

She hums the sounds back to him from deep within her drowsing sleep.

He takes a small length of ribbon from beside her bed and plaits her long white hair - quite carefully and loosely enough, but when he pulls too hard he must murmur “ar lath ma,” tenderly, as she makes soft protesting noises.

When she is dressed in the crisp soft shirt, the feathery covers piled up to her lovely cheek, still giving him a peek of her closed eye and the blue loops of her vallaslin, and when the candles are bright, and the doors to the balcony have been pulled closed, and the sun has dropped away, and the first stars are joining the sky, the Dread Wolf joins his love under the sheets. His arms wrap tight around her.

“Ar lath ma,” he says against the back of her neck, his breath hot. And then he goes to tell her in her dreams.


End file.
